The March 5 meeting ended without an agreement. Trump’s lawyers proceeded to debate among themselves how to deal with Mueller’s continuing request for an interview. The president, meanwhile, continued to stew about the canceled January interview, believing he could have cleared his own name.
* * *
—
On March 6, amid these discussions of a presidential interview, Rex Tillerson departed on a sensitive diplomatic mission to Africa to mend fences and ease tensions caused by Trump’s decidedly undiplomatic rhetoric. Like just about everyone else in Trump World, Tillerson had a target on his back. He had internal enemies. In the fall of 2017, he weathered reports that Trump was cooking up a plan to oust him as the nation’s top diplomat. Rumors of his demise were so pervasive that they took on a name of their own—Rexit—even though few people knew how forcefully Tillerson had confronted Trump.
Yet through it all, Trump tolerated Tillerson and kept him at his side. In fact, back in January, following fresh reports about the president’s calling some African and Caribbean nations “shithole countries,” a diplomatic embarrassment for the United States, Trump sought Tillerson’s assurance that he would stay on as secretary of state.
“We’re good, right, Rex?” Trump asked as the two finished up a meeting in the Oval Office.
“What do you mean, sir?” Tillerson replied.
“You’re staying on, right?” Trump said. “You’re going to stay with this?”
“Yes, sir,” Tillerson said. “As long as you feel I’m of use to you, I will continue to serve.”
The president slapped the secretary of state on the back. “Good, good,” Trump said. “You’re staying on.”
Tillerson’s five-country visit to Africa in March was the first trip he had made to the continent as secretary. It was a listening tour more than anything else, an attempt to repair relations that had been strained by Trump’s “shithole” remark. His first few days abroad went smoothly, but starting on March 9, Tillerson and some of his staff were suffering from a wrenching food-bourne illness. The doctor who traveled with him concluded they had eaten or drunk something bad and would be sick for a day or two but recover fine. Unbeknownst to Tillerson, trouble was brewing back home.
On Friday, March 9, at about 7:00 p.m. in Washington, White House chief of staff John Kelly told his aides he needed to call Tillerson immediately from a secure phone. It was about 2:00 a.m. on Saturday in Kenya, where the secretary was staying, but Kelly insisted they wake Tillerson up. It was that important.
“The president is really upset,” Kelly told Tillerson, urging him to return home. “You should wind up your trip.”
Kelly tried to convey the urgency of the situation to Tillerson, whom he trusted as an ally in steering Trump away from calamity. Earlier that day, Kelly spotted U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, a Tillerson rival, and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, who had sometimes tussled with the secretary, leaving the Oval Office. Once Kelly got inside the room, the president was raving about Tillerson and what a terrible secretary of state he was. The chief of staff couldn’t be sure, but he assumed that whatever Haley and McMaster had told the president set him off.
First, Tillerson had to think through the logistics. He had a packed schedule for the next three days and was already canceling upcoming events because his staff felt so ill.
“John, I have a lot of events lined up,” Tillerson answered. “I can do that, but . . .” His voice trailed off.
Kelly told him he would check into things and call him back. He did.
“It’s all patched up,” Kelly said. “Don’t worry about it. No need to rush back.”
Still, Tillerson knew something was up. Later that morning, he made arrangements to cut his trip short by a day, leaving on Monday, March 12, instead of Tuesday.
Kelly called again the next night with another harsh wake-up call. It was Saturday evening in Washington, but roughly 2:00 a.m. Sunday in Africa.
“You really need to get back,” Kelly told Tillerson. “The president is going to fire you.”
Kelly explained that now Trump wanted to oust Tillerson by tweet, and the chief of staff was trying to stop him. Kelly was treading water, trying to buy time. Tillerson didn’t seem that upset about the prospect of losing his job. However, he did stress over the terrible optics. How could the president fire his secretary of state while he was on an overseas mission? It would signal a breakdown in American government.
“John, that is really not good,” Tillerson said. “That’s going to look terrible. For the country.”
Tillerson told Kelly he could get back to Washington by about 4:00 a.m. Tuesday; then he’d go to his Kalorama home to get a few hours’ sleep before coming into the office.
On Monday evening, rumors that Tillerson was likely out began to spread through the Washington press corps, but State Department officials flatly dismissed the chatter as false. Tillerson didn’t immediately share with the reporters traveling with him to Africa what Kelly had told him, but he also didn’t lie as he explained why he was cutting the trip short.
“I felt like, look, I just need to get back,” Tillerson told reporters aboard his flight home from Nigeria. “I just felt like I need to get back.”
On what Tillerson knew might be his last gaggle with reporters, the secretary decided to break with the president on Russia.
The British government had just accused Russia of orchestrating the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders declined to lay blame on Moscow, but Tillerson was clear in his assessment: “Much work remains to respond to the troubling behavior and actions on the part of the Russian government.”
Tillerson’s plane touched down at Joint Base Andrews right on time, around 4:00 a.m. Tuesday, and his driver spirited the secretary home so that he could get some shut-eye. Then, after Tillerson arose to get dressed and ready for his day, Trump’s tweet landed with a thud. It was 8:44 a.m.
“Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State,” Trump wrote. “He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!”
Alerted to the tweet by a phone call from his chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, Tillerson felt it was important to say something quickly to calm folks down at the State Department. He told Peterlin what he wanted to convey and asked her to have Steve Goldstein, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, issue a statement on his behalf.
Goldstein had gotten up around 3:00 a.m., just in case he was needed when the secretary arrived at Andrews, but had no idea about the drama over the weekend. At about 8:45 a.m., he was conducting a Skype session with some employees in U.S. embassies of African nations when two aides showed up and gestured with a cutting motion across their throats. You have to go, one finally told Goldstein. He abruptly ended the session. For a moment, he thought that something might have happened to his spouse.
“The secretary has been fired on Twitter,” one staffer told him.
“What?” Goldstein said.
They showed him the tweet. Goldstein gulped.
“Let’s take the back elevator to my office,” he said.
Goldstein glanced down at his phone. He had dozens of phone messages and texts, most of them from reporters.
When he got to his office, TV screens were blaring the news that Trump had booted Tillerson and that Kelly had told him he was out. Goldstein reached Peterlin on her cell phone. She had just gotten off the phone with Tillerson and gave Goldstein the statement he could issue. It conveyed the truth but left out some of the unpleasant details.
“The Secretary did not speak to the President this morning and is unaware of the reason, but he is grateful for the opportunity to serve, and still believes strongly that public service is a noble calling and not to be regretted,” Goldstein said in the statement.
Within minutes, Twitter and cable news lit up, emphasizing the differences between the White House’s version of events and the State Department’s, and citing Goldstein’s statement. Watching the coverage on television, Trump seethed. One of Goldstein’s aides rushed into his office to say that Steve Doocy was on the phone. Goldstein didn’t immediately recognize the name, puzzled over it a minute, and thought it sounded familiar.
“Steve Doocy? From Fox News?” Goldstein said. “I don’t know him. I’m not talking to anybody I don’t know.”
Then the aide came back and said, no, it’s Sean Doocey.
Goldstein asked him to please find out who that was. The answer: Doocey worked at the White House, in the presidential personnel office. Goldstein called him back.
“The president has relieved you of your duties,” Doocey told him.
Goldstein let that sink in.
Into the silence, Doocey’s voice came back.
“Do you want something in writing to this effect?” Doocey asked.
Goldstein remained calm and said, “Yes, please.”
Once Tillerson got into the office and learned of Goldstein’s firing, he was upset.
“This is not right,” Tillerson told his public affairs chief. “You just issued my statement.”
Tillerson said he would call Kelly to say his staffer shouldn’t be faulted for issuing his statement, but Goldstein told him there was no need to try to reverse the decision. He said he was mostly sad about the country losing a stand-up public servant like Tillerson. He didn’t care about his own job.
Not long after, Trump called Tillerson from Air Force One as he was flying to California for a fund-raiser. He spoke as if they were friends catching up on their respective days.
“Hi, Rex,” the president said. “I hope you saw all the good things I said about you on TV.”
Tillerson had not had time to turn on a television, much less to sit and watch one. He had no idea what Trump was talking about, but the president had complimented Tillerson to reporters earlier. “I actually got along well with Rex,” Trump told them, “but really it was a different mind-set, a different thinking.”
“You should be very happy,” Trump told Tillerson. “You never really wanted to do this job. Now you can retire and go back to your ranch and relax.”
Tillerson found this summary surreal. He responded without emotion.
“Yes, Mr. President,” he said.
“This will be great,” Trump said.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Tillerson replied, robotically.
“Okay, so I’m back Friday,” Trump said. “Come by the Oval and we’ll take a picture and I’ll sign it.”
“Yes,” Tillerson said. “Sure, Mr. President.”
They hung up.
Trump acted as if he and Tillerson would be buddies, never actually mentioning the firing or offering a rationale for it. At the same time, some of Trump’s top aides were privately trashing Tillerson to reporters. They argued that Tillerson had been a poor manager at the State Department, isolating himself from thousands of career diplomats and getting bogged down in a bureaucratic restructuring plan. They said Trump had soured on Tillerson in part because of how much negative press he received and because the president thought he was too arrogant. And they said Tillerson lacked necessary gravitas abroad because foreign leaders did not believe he spoke for the president. They didn’t mention the real reason for that: Trump had repeatedly contradicted Tillerson publicly.
Kelly felt defeated. He had struggled to protect Tillerson’s job and feared the result of Trump’s grinding through another of his guardrails. Aboard Air Force One en route to California, Kelly uttered an ominous view to a handful of other aides: “The forces of darkness have won today.”
Tillerson decided he wanted to speak for himself, making an on-camera statement from the State Department at 2:00 p.m. He called Kelly to tell him the general outline of the statement he planned to deliver and to make sure it was okay. He didn’t want to create another ricochet of reaction from the White House, as occurred with Goldstein’s statement. Kelly gave a green light to the general outline.
In his remarks, Tillerson did not thank or compliment Trump. Instead, he said he was honored to serve his country, praised Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, thanked career diplomats for serving with “honesty and integrity,” and expressed gratitude to the American people for “acts of kindness.”
The omission angered Trump, who was quick to see personal slights in the words of his subordinates.
A few days later, the White House delivered yet another demeaning insult to Tillerson, this time a blunder by Kelly, his friend. The chief of staff convened an off-the-record session with a couple dozen reporters and shared his account of Tillerson’s firing. Kelly said that when he reached Tillerson in Nairobi to let him know he may soon be fired, the secretary of state was suffering from traveler’s diarrhea.
“He had Montezuma’s revenge, or whatever you call it over there,” Kelly said. “He was talking to me from the toilet.”
The journalists and White House aides in the room grimaced. Kelly later regretted that his off-the-record remark was reported in the media, another humiliation for Tillerson. It hadn’t even been true. Tillerson and his staff had all caught a bug that caused violent vomiting and dehydration. He had a mild case compared with some of his senior staff and had canceled some of his appearances to let them rest. When Kelly called Tillerson with the bad news, his very ill chief of staff and another aide had dutifully come to the secretary’s room to wake him from a deep sleep. He took the call in his bedroom suite.
Tillerson would stay on the job until March 31, to help ensure an orderly transition, but he never went to the White House to take his picture with the president. Nearly a year would pass before he and Kelly spoke again.
* * *
—
As Trump disposed of his secretary of state, he was also browbeating Dowd to take to television and Twitter to bludgeon Mueller—precisely the sorts of attacks that the president’s initial legal team steered away from—and spotlight what the president saw as the partisan motivations of the special counsel and other investigators. Trump believed Congressman Devin Nunes’s theory that the probe was tainted from the start, and on Friday, March 16, he seized an opportunity to exact revenge.
For his role in steering the initial investigation into Russia’s election interference and possible conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign, Andrew McCabe was a frequent target of Trump’s ire. McCabe had already stepped down as the FBI’s deputy director under pressure after the Justice Department’s inspector general found he had authorized the disclosure of sensitive information to the media about the Hillary Clinton email case, but technically he remained an FBI employee.
As a twenty-year veteran of the bureau, McCabe was set to retire as soon as he turned fifty on March 18 and would be eligible for his full retirement benefits. But Trump, with the help of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, sought to punish a foe. Just before ten o’clock on the evening of March 16, Sessions fired McCabe effective immediately, saying that he was acting on the recommendations of the inspector general and the FBI office that handles discipline. The swift termination threatened to cost McCabe a portion of his retirement benefits.
Though technically the firing was executed by Sessions, the loudest celebrations came from the White House residence, where the president pecked out his reaction on Twitter at 12:08 a.m.: “Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI—A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!”
On March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, Trump began a weekend of public and private brooding over the Russia investigation. He tweeted that the Mueller probe was a “WITCH HUNT” that “should never have been started” and claimed it was “based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier
.” Trump spent the weekend in Washington and complained to friends and advisers that his lawyers were doing a lousy job protecting him. He said the situation was particularly painful because he believed Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw the probe, was up to no good and shielding a corrupt investigation from scrutiny by Nunes and other Trump allies in Congress. Dowd succumbed to Trump’s wishes to publicly assail Mueller when he emailed reporters a statement calling on Rosenstein to immediately end the probe.
“I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier,” Dowd said in the statement.
Dowd got twisted in knots trying to explain his statement. He first told The Daily Beast that he was speaking on behalf of the president. A few hours later, he backtracked, telling The Washington Post that he was speaking for himself and not on Trump’s behalf.
Regardless, Senate minority leader Charles Schumer warned of “severe consequences” if Trump and his legal team took action to interfere with or end the Russia investigation. Robert Bauer, a former Obama White House counsel, said facetiously, “That is certainly an unconventional way of mounting a legal defense.” Dowd increasingly felt sapped by Trump’s heaping blame on him for the probe not wrapping up quickly. But on that point, the president was in the right. It was Dowd who had given him an all-too-rosy forecast.
A Very Stable Genius Page 24
